She's 70, Her Kids Are 13: How This Mom Keeps Up With Teen Twins

HELL'S KITCHEN, NY — You might remember Aleta St. James smiling in a golden V-neck sweater and cradling her baby bump with both hands next to a screaming headline on the front page of the Daily News: “Twins At 57!” It didn’t take long before St. James — the Hell's Kitchen-based “energy healer” to the stars — found herself in the national spotlight in 2004. Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric and reporters around the country wanted to know what it’s like to be the oldest woman in America to ever give birth to twins.

"Of course it's crazy, but I am a little nuts," she told the Daily News before the twins’ first birthday in 2005.

St. James told the tabloid she didn’t obsess over her advanced age while raising toddlers. “Singing Elmo songs” kept her feeling young, the Daily News reported.

St. James is now 70. Instead of Elmo tunes, Gian and Francesca jam to Justin Bieber. If the kids aren’t staring at their iPhones, they’re probably playing Minecraft. Indeed, they exhibit great skill in taking advantage of their “technically challenged” mother. But despite the nearly six-decade age gap, the septuagenarian keeps pace just fine.

It runs in her family.

St. James grew up in a large Italian family in Canarsie, Brooklyn. Family photo albums are packed with pictures that have as many as 60 people crammed into the frame. Her grandmother, Nicoletta Bianchino, had 13 children and was 54-years-old when she gave birth to St. James’ mother Frances Sliwa.

St. James said she always wanted children but, you know, life got in the way.

She left home when she was 17 to jet off to drama school in London and hang out with the Beatles. In her 20s, she landed a starring role in the Amsterdam production of the musical “Hair.” Back in New York City, she played in the house band at Greenwich Village hotspot Trude Heller’s.

But superstardom wasn’t in the cards. Instead, she tapped into what she said is an innate ability to sense and heal people’s problems and mental blocks and shifted gears from showbusiness to healing.

St. James has been in the energy healing business for 40 years. Think of her as part self-help guru, spiritual adviser and massage therapist with psychic abilities — an “intuitive gift” she said runs in her family. Soon, St. James’ famous friends became her best clients, and the business became her life.

Before she knew it, St. James was childless in her late 40s.

“My friends said, ‘Don’t you think you should get started?’. But I don’t see myself in an age group,” St. James said. “I don’t go according to what everybody else says. I had this desire to have a child or children forever. I just wasn’t doing it in everybody else’s timeframe.”

At 53, St. James decided the time was right. It took three years for her to get pregnant, the Daily News reported.

After her family’s moment in the spotlight, St. James faced the harsh reality of being a single, working mom in Manhattan. Everything was more difficult with twins. Finding a nursery school was liking “getting into Harvard,” she said.

She learned that in motherhood, like Broadway, the show must go on — no matter what happens.

“You learn how to quickly handle things, not get so emotional and then focus on the next thing you need to do,” St. James said.

Ask St. James about the scariest part of being a mom and she’ll tell you about their family vacation at Disney World.

While Gian and St. James ate lunch in the Magic Kingdom, Francesca set off to take pictures of the Disney Store and didn’t come back. St. James panicked. She flagged down security guards, who put the store on lockdown while they searched for the missing girl. About a half-hour later, Francesca showed up wondering what all the fuss was about.

“I wanted to take pictures of everything I liked,” Francesca said of her memory of her mother’s scariest day.

St. James says Francesca’s Disney World misadventure, and so many other minor disasters, remind her how grateful she is for the support of her faithful assistant, Teresa Nigolian, and “Guardian Angel” brother Curtis Sliwa.

Nigolian started working for St. James’ healing business and became a close family friend and clutch helper at home. And Sliwa, founder of the neighborhood patrol group Guardian Angels, helps prepare the twins for navigating big city life. He taught Francesca self defense and takes Gian — who loves trains — with the Guardian Angels to patrol the subways while teaching him about New York’s subway system.

At 70, St. James struggles to keep up with her tech-savvy kids. She does her best — blocking certain TV channels and keeping tabs on what videos they watch on YouTube — despite being admittedly “clueless” about navigating the internet on her own.

Like most moms, St. James says she’s already worried about all the pressure the twins will face in high school next year as they spend more time on their own in the city. She hopes that they’ll be prepared to be a bit more independent. She sure is.

“When they want to branch off, I’m going to be totally prepared for that because I also have my own life going on,” St. James said.

By the time the kids graduate college, St. James will be nearly 80 years old. That doesn’t mean much to St. James, a self-proclaimed “anti-aging expert.” To her, age is just a number.

And in St James’ expert opinion, 70 is the new 50.